Abstract
Abstract This article examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s recourse to Robert Mayer’s physical and physiological concept of release (Auslösung) in various fragments, notes and writings from the 1880ies. Nietzsche’s understanding of force can be articulated as a critic of a purely mechanical understanding of the thermodynamic law of the conservation of energy. Based on Mayer’s writings, Nietzsche describes the eruptive quantitative release of forces as a qualitative process shaped by the bodily perception of forces. The underlying feeling of force (Kraftgefühl) can be traced in biological, psychological, historical and aesthetic phenomena and is rendered by Nietzsche both anthropomorphically as will and as a universal physiological law that determines bodily, social and moral actions.
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